Tag: Things

A lot of people don’t recognize and hardly understand the intricacies of blogging. Some go as far as dismissing it as some kind of hobby, rather than recognizing it as the business it is. Jumia Travel, the leading online travel agency, shares 4 things nobody tells you about blogging.

Blogging is Not Some Get Rich Quick Scheme

It’s nice to hear about blogs that charge thousands and hundreds of thousands for publicity or adverts of any kind. But what most people don’t get is that blogging is hard and it takes a lot of time and patience to be read widely enough to get noticed by firms, corporations and companies for publicity and advertisements. Most of the widely read blogs today took months, even years of consistent and tireless effort to get to where they are today and have the kind of recognition they have. Blogging is hardly a get rich quick scheme.

Blogging is Not That Easy
There is a general belief that running a blog is what you do when you either don’t have a job or don’t have anything better to do. Many believe it’s easy and requires little or no effort. That’s inaccurate. Aside having to constantly come up with interesting and engaging content for your blog (almost every hour of the day if yours is a news blog), you also have to consider the mails, questions and comments that you always have to attend to, to help drive engagement on your blog. Eventually, as your blog grows, you’ll realize it’s hardly something you can do on your own.

A Blogger is Not Only a Blogger

As a blogger, especially when starting out, in order to grow your readership you are going to feel the need to be a web designer (trying to find the right web layout that will be attractive and user friendly), a social media strategist (ensuring you use social media to get as much publicity for your blog as you can), an SEO specialist, a web marketing guru and an amateur photographer all at the same time! It’s a lot. You might not exactly be a professional in all the above mentioned areas, but you have to be able to handle them well enough not to suck at it and to help grow your blog’s readership.

The Business Side

Many people tend to underestimate or don’t understand the business side of blogging. They either start demanding for money too soon or are completely clueless about how sponsored content works around the policies of the corresponding firms, corporations and companies. A good number of people don’t realize that some brands or companies have payment terms of ninety days; meaning even after doing publicity for them, you might not get your payment until after three months. Some brands also have you working on sponsored content and you will have to send them draft upon draft till they like what they see. Since you’ve likely already signed a contract with them, you really don’t have much of choice. It is important to recognize the business side of blogging and try to understand it before going into it.

The New Volkswagen Polo will be unveiled to the world on 16th June, 2017. This will be the sixth generation Polo and will be coming to India next year as well. Being a completely new-generation, the new VW Polo will sport a new exterior design and will also be slightly bigger than the model currently on sale. The new Volkswagen Polo has been spotted testing many a times as well. Volkswagen says that the design language on the new Polo will complement the sporty demeanour of the car. In fact, the company also released a few teaser images of the new Polo and the Yellow colour surely puts the cheer in the new Polo car.

Here are some important things you should know about the new Polo car.

The first and the most important thing is that the new-gen VW Polo will now be manufactured having the versatile MQB A0 platform as its underpinning. This is the same platform, which also underpins the newly launched Volkswagen Tiguan in India. The previous generation Volkswagen Polo was built on the PQ25 platform.

(New-Generation Volkswagen Polo)

The silhouette of the car has changed. The new VW Polo has grown bigger and the wheelbase too has increased by 90 mm, from 2,470 mm to 2,550 mm. The width has increased by a fair margin too. Of course, the car will continue to be less than 4 metres in length. The cabin will have more room than the outgoing generation of the Polo.

As far as connectivity is concerned, the top trims of the new VW Polo will have a 9.5-inch touchscreen infotainment system which will have smartphone integration in the form on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. There will be other connectivity options as well, depending on the trim level.

(This is the base model of the new-gen Polo. Notice the halogen headlamps)

As far as engine options are concerned, the new-gen Polo will have the 1.2-litre petrol and a 1.5-litre diesel engine when it goes on sale in India. We might also see the sportier GT variants of the Polo in due course of time.

The new-generation Polo will also form the basis of the new-gen Vento and the new-gen Ameo as well.

HIGHLIGHTS

CES 2017 saw 3,800 exhibitors and nearly 200,000 visitors

Amazon, Qualcomm, and Nvidia had the biggest impacts

Multinational corporates and tiny startups shared space on the show floor

To say that CES is enormous would be an understatement. Officially, there are 3,800 exhibitors spread out over 2.6 million square feet of hotel and convention centre floorspace, but there are peripheral gatherings and an untold number of companies who park themselves nearby and compete for attention as well. In amongst the millions of products and ideas there are to be seen, finding something that could be called the ‘Best of CES 2017’ was difficult but not impossible. And indeed, we found a few products at CES 2017 that stood out for a variety of reasons – good, and not-so-good.

At CES 2017, there were fridges that take photos of their contents that you can check remotely, TVs so thin that they can stick to your walls with magnets, smartphones which let you see how clothes look on virtual models that appear right in front of you, and gaming laptops with three screens – all from some of the world’s biggest technology companies. There were also hundreds of startups and first-time exhibitors from different corners of the worlds at CES 2017, showing off ideas that could one day become just as mainstream.

1. Amazon Alexa
Amazon itself wasn’t showing off products at CES 2017, but its work was evident thanks to partnerships with a variety of companies. LG kicked off the first press conference of the show with an Alexa-powered refrigerator and a pair of home robots which can order groceries, control smart appliances, and stream music from Amazon. Lenovo showed off its Smart Assistant, essentially a third-party Amazon Echo, Hyundai is demonstrating cars that use Alexa, and various startups are building products such as headphones using its framework. Natural-language voice assistants are the current big thing in tech, and Alexa is the only viable alternative to Google, giving companies every reason to tie it into their products and services.

2. Honda Riding Assist
A huge part of CES 2017 was dedicated to cars and bikes, which isn’t surprising considering the amount of tech that goes into automobiles these days. Even with the world’s top luxury brands in attendance, Honda stole the show with its Riding Assist concept, a bike that can stay upright without any support, compensate for manoeuvers that would topple ordinary bikes, and even drive itself when commanded to do so. This CES 2017 tech could one day make transportation safer and more accessible to a wide range of people.

ALSO SEECES 2017: Our Picks So Far From the World’s Biggest Tech Show

3. Nvidia GeForce Now
While Nvidia isn’t going to stop selling graphics processors anytime soon, the company has diversified into massive-scale number-crunching in a huge way. At a huge CES 2017 pre-show press conference, founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that Nvidia has finally achieved a goal it has been working on for years: the ability to host games on its own powerful servers so that PC users without an expensive gaming machine can offload all the hard work and stream just the video output like they would a movie. Input lag and bandwidth requirements are the biggest hurdles, but pricing scales with the amount of power you need, so a lot of people who can’t afford a high-end PC could end up being very happy.

4. Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Each year, Qualcomm announces a new flagship processor for smartphones and connected devices. The Snapdragon 835 was first announced over a month ago, but CES 2017 was the first time its capabilities were on display to the public. While no actual phones using the Snapdragon 835 were being displayed, reference units were running demos including extreme vibration reduction in video recording, positional audio detection and filtering, and live 3D video stitching with directional audio. This new chip will be built on a 10nm process, and is smaller and more efficient than the Snapdragon 820/821. Phones that use it will support advanced machine learning and VR/AR experiences, plus of course huge screens, high-resolution video capture, biometric security, and improved battery life.

5. HP Sprout Pro
The original HP Sprout and Sprout Pro started out as experiments in 2D and 3D interaction, and was aimed mainly at children. Now, HP is going after a different market altogether with the second-generation Sprout Pro, a slicker and more capable version of the same idea that was unveiled at CES 2017. The projected horizontal surface is now full-HD, and can be a full-fledged secondary display. You can draw directly into software using a stylus, which feels just like writing on paper. 3D scanning is simple and quick – all you have to do is hold objects beneath the scanner and turn them around till you see the resulting model on screen fill out. There’s a kiosk mode that will allow users to customise things they want to buy and see how they look before pulling the trigger.

6. Inspero Vinci Smart Headphones with AI
Finally, we have the Vinci Smart Headphones with AI, a product that snagged our attention at CES 2017 for all the right and wrong reasons and brought us immense joy. We are truly inspired by the sheer absurdity and audacity of it – we have no idea who would ever want to wear or use one of these things, but we love the fact that somebody not only thought of it, but went ahead and made it. Basically, you have the equivalent of an iPod touch physically jammed onto one side of a comically oversized headset. It can store music, work as a Bluetooth headset, or stream Web content over Wi-Fi or 3G with its own SIM card. Swipe gestures let you control playback with the device on your ear, and AI lets you generate playlists as well as interact with devices using – you guessed it – Alexa. Inspero set out to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter and ended up with nearly twenty times as much, so we’ll probably see these out in the wild, even if only as the ultimate self-referential hipster gag.

Overall, CES 2017 was fairly underwhelming, with no emerging product category like drones or wearables to get excited about, and no banner feature like 4K and 3D in years past. There was no sign of progress towards making IoT devices practical and desirable, which means that no company has found its footing even a year after CES 2016’s high-volume proclamations of it being the next billion-dollar industry. What this year’s edition did show us is that technology is making its way into even more aspects of our daily lives, and there are still a few companies bold enough to try new things.